This collection of articles drawn from a scholarly conference in Paris in 2001 effectively brings together twentieth-century Islam in Russia, Central Asia, and China into a cohesive tome that reveals the region’s interconnections. This compilation successfully takes advantage of new academic approaches seeking to undermine the nation-based discourse and suggests the need for a better methodology to confront the divisive tendencies of Islamic, Soviet Central Asian, and Chinese studies. Stéphane Dudoignon forwards the moniker of “Northern Eurasia” to unify the regions surveyed, but this seems relatively superficial. More notably, this work exposes the fact that much more research is needed and that even a common use of terms and spellings continues to elude scholars on the region.
The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals with “‘High’ and ‘Popular’ Culture” and the second raises the issue of “History and Memory.” The editor briefly mentions that the cleavage between “ritual” and “learned” Islam provided the inspiration for the first section, a point never revisited significantly in the text. Nevertheless the articles themselves reflect little bearing on these categories and they would have been better discarded. Ultimately, the work centers on the larger question of the transmission of Islamic education and culture in a broad regional space during the twentieth century. This is already a huge task unnecessarily complicated by other markers.
The first section begins with Tomohiko Uyama’s article, “‘Devotion to the People’ and Paternalistic Authoritarianism among Qazaq Intellectuals, from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1917.” Uyama describes the problem of authority in the relations between intellectuals and society. In a self-defeating manner, the discovery of populist ideas among the Kazakh intellectual elite (narodniki) conflicted with their oratorical affectations, which reinforced paternalism. Despite their failure, Uyama confirms the importance of the Kazakh intelligentsia’s effort to incorporate native religious and cultural values into their colonial system of beliefs. In an even less successful case of adapting local cultural values to new hegemonic ideologies, Rafyq Mohammatshin’s “The Tatar Intelligentsia and the Clergy, 1917-1937” explains the crisis of spiritual consciousness between Islamic believers and non-believers through a detailed examination of Tatar intellectual sources in the early Soviet period. In his view, Moscow’s centralism ultimately overwhelmed Tatar efforts to cultivate their own cultural synthesis of Islam and Communism. In another description of local responses to centralized dictates, Bakhtiyar Babadjanov’s “Debates over Islam in Contemporary Uzbekistan: A View from Within” surveys the theological schism within the Uzbek ulama that emerged in the 1970s between “modernists” and “conservatives” as a response to state-sanctioned Islamic education and to greater access to the Islamic world. This schism took on a new significance following independence and the subsequent re-Islamicization of the Uzbek population, who understood the religion as more than a source of cultural and historical identity.
The complex synthesis of Islamic and Communist ideals at the local level was not unique to the Russian and Soviet imperial experiences. In her “Brothers and Comrades: Muslim Fundamentalists and Communists Allied for the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge in China,” Leila Cherif-Chebbi asserts that the Chinese Communist Party has long supported the Islamic fundamentalist movements of “New Religion” and Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers) for their opposition to the Japanese invasion, teachings of modernity, and comprehension of the importance of education and propaganda. Although there have been several clashes between the two groups, the success of their relationship depended on the ability of Chinese fundamentalist groups to work within the highly centralized and politically intrusive state system. Echoing this theme in “Chinese Muslim Women: From Autonomy to Dependence,” Elisabeth Allиs argues that the autonomy of the women’s mosque among Hui Chinese is now being challenged by increasing fundamentalism in the region. As Chinese Muslims are further integrated into the Islamic world, Allиs believes that women will continue to have their independent authority eroded.
The second part of the book begins with Adeeb Khalid’s “Nation into History: The Origins of National Historiography in Central Asia.” Here, Khalid contends that both Soviet nationality policy and the Jadid discourse of the turn of the century contributed to the creation of a particular formation of Central Asian national identity within the framework of Soviet Marxism. Khalid persuasively stresses that although the conceptions of Jadid historical discourse quickly shifted during the 1920s from pan-Turkic “Chaghatayism” to ethnonationalism to meet Soviet demands, the Jadids did play a vital role in isolating national histories from Islam and thereby creating ethnic identities well before the arrival of the Soviets. Considering a less successful endeavor to conceptualize local history through the Soviet historical lens, Damir Is’haqov’s “Through the Textbooks: The Academic Intelligentsia and the Shaping of Tatar National Consciousness (1940s to 1990s)” confronts the process of rewriting Tatar history in the 1940s and 1950s in order to render the “friendship of the peoples” and to erase the Golden Horde legacy that challenged Moscow’s predominance. Although this massive campaign to “revise” student textbooks was widely criticized by Tatar historians, they could do little to overturn this interpretation until the 1980s. Is’haqov sees this story as little more than Russian chauvinism and Soviet imperialism.
Following more nuanced approaches, both Bruce G. Privratsky and Stéphane A. Dudoignon address the titular question: “Devout Societies vs. Impious States?” by centering Islam as an essential part of the region’s heritage and by demonstrating the motivation of local populations to subvert “impious states” through their preservation of Islam. Privratsky’s “‘Turkestan Belongs to the Qojas’: Local Knowledge of a Muslim Tradition” offers an anthropological study of the enduring legacy of Kazakh Qojas in one Kazakh community. Focusing on personal and clientele relations within religious communities rather than institutional authorities, Privratsky paints a picture of the survival of Islam in Kazakhstan through the Soviet era. Even to the present time, as he admits, Kazakhs in Turkestan prefer to visit their neighborhood Qoja rather than the mosque. Dudoignon describes a different process of positioning religion in local and regional identities in his “Local Lore, the Transmission of Learning, and Communal Identity in Late 20th-Century Tajikistan: The Khujand-Nama of ‘Arifjan Yahyazad Khujandi.” Examining the northern city of Khujand during the Tajik civil war in the 1990s, Dudoignon explains the project to elevate Khujand by sanctifying the city through the designation of holy sites and holy saints and by creating a direct theological link with Mecca (so as to bypass the official muftiyyat of Dushanbe).
As a brief conclusion to the second half of the book, Sabine Trebinjac’s “Le savoir musical des Ouighours: et s’il s’agissait d’ambivalence de la mémoire?” links back to the initial discussion of the politicization of culture. Examining the experience of Uyghur musicians in China, Trebinjac describes the tension between their “private” attempts to preserve and cultivate Uyghur musical traditions and their “public” efforts to service state propaganda. Although Carole Pegg’s similar work on Mongolia is surprisingly ignored here (Carole Pegg. Mongolian Music, Dance, & Oral Narrative. Performing Diverse Identities. Seattle, 2001), Trebinjac’s research suggests the diversity of forms in which popular and political cultures can coexist despite their oppositions.
Although this collection of articles occasionally suffers from lack of clarity and editing, the rendering of these conference proceedings in English is admirable. This is not a collection of essays for the casual reader; rather it presents an internal dialogue for scholars seeking discursive tools to analyze the Eurasian Islamic world across its boundaries, religious interactions, and historical experiences.